There are many environments where multiple video display devices, for example televisions (TV) exist, but a few tuners/receivers are in place to send audio and video to the TVs. Sports bars are a prime example of such an environment, but many others such examples are extant, especially when it is desired to send different channels or subchannels to different places in an environment, but to save cost, only a limited number of receivers are provided.
In the sports bar environment, for example, bartenders want to be able to control the content on each TV without having to use single or multiple TV remotes, since using a TV remote may cause adjacent TVs to also change channels. Using a remote in a sports bar thus now requires walking to each TV with a specific remote to change the channel, which may cause other nearby TVs to also change channels.
One such receiver, although there are many such receivers, which is often placed in a multiple TV environment such as a sports bar is the DirecTV® COM1000 content distribution system (designed and manufactured by TECHNICOLOR Inc., the owner of the present application and invention), which is a satellite TV receiver system capable of tuning and transcrypting up to 24 TV channels and which tunes and demodulates an MPEG-2 transport stream for further distribution in an environment through, for example, a QAM modulator device or an internet protocol (IP) data distribution system, for example an IPTV system. The DirecTV® COM1000 is ideal for the multiple TV environment such as hotels, sports bars, and the like.
The DirecTV® COM1000 includes a QAM modulator card or board which receives the demodulated MPEG-2 transport stream for further distribution. The card is denoted a QAM24 modulator and it receives MPEG-2 transport packets from an Ethernet port and then QAM modulates the MPEG-2 transport packets on one of twelve carrier frequencies. Each input stream results in one output QAM modulated channel (such as cable channel 50-1). However, nothing in the current content distribution systems allows individual receivers to play separate content on each TV without controlling the content with a separate remote for each TV.
Moreover, currently there is no way in which a manager of such an environment, for example a Bartender in a sports bar, can search for video content and see what channels are currently playing and to allows the content to changes, tracked and otherwise adjusted.
A television display system needs to display an interactive program guide with current and future program information for each channel. In order to acquire the information, the system must tune to the frequency on which the program information is being broadcast. This information may be stored for all known channels, but will not initially be available, and will become stale over time. For this reason, the channel must be tuned as the user navigates within the interactive guide.
Some generations of Technicolor DirecTV receivers have automatically tuned to the associated channel when the user highlights the channel designator in an on-screen guide, but this was only to display the channel in the scaled video window, not to acquire associated data. It would therefore be desirable to provide a user interface and system to perform such tasks, in order to acquire the necessary programs and data for auto-tuning of program guides.